The release of the next 3DMark is right around the corner, and to help tide us over Futuremark has released a new trailer called "Fire Strike" that shows off some pretty DirectX 11 effects - aka: effects we hope to actually see implemented in our future games. If you can believe it, this trailer is even shorter than the last one, with the demo portion itself running for just about 25 seconds. It's called "Fire Strike" but it could have easily been called "Fire vs. Ice" since that's that battle we're witnessing.

What do you guys think?

To quote Futuremark, this trailer features the use of "tessellation, dynamic particle illumination and shadowing, smoke simulation using grid-based fluid dynamics, volume ray casting with shadows and a wide variety of post processing effects including depth of field, blooms, distortions and various lens effects."

Unless you're a game developer or happen to keep on top of graphics technologies, it's a little difficult to pick out specific uses of most of these technologies in the demo. It would have been nice if the company had another video, slowed down, that pointed out the special effects we're seeing - especially the DirectX 11-specific ones, since that's pretty much the point here.

One of the biggest reasons the next version of 3DMark is going to be exciting is that it's the first that can be run cross-platform and have their results directly comparable. Even though the "Ice Storm" demo is optimized for mobile devices and runs through the OpenGL ES API, its scores can be compared to the same test being run on your desktop PC running through the DirectX 9 featureset. For benchmarkers, the next 3DMark is looking to be the ultimate addition to their digital toolkits.